Maurice Blanchot, _L'Arrêt de Mort_

THERE ARE BOOKS one avoids reading because one feels one should have already read them. For example, unlike just about everyone else my age (= getting up there), I did not read All Quiet on the Western Front in my teens. When I was in college and graduate school, it seemed utterly beside the point to read All Quiet on the Western Front when it was obviously more urgent to read Dostoevsky, or Barthes, or Celan, or Bakhtin...et cetera. Now, I feel I've missed my window.  It would be easy enough to pick a copy up and take a few hours to read it, but it isn't it too late, in a way?

My should-have-already-read-but-have-not list also includes Herzen's memoirs, E. M. Cioran, For Whom the Bell Tolls... let's just stop there, before this gets even more embarrassing, and begins to include titles I have allowed people to believe I have read.

someone: "You know the Biographia Literaria, of course."
me: "Mmmm." [there were some pages excerpted in the Norton, right?  Shouldn't that count?]
someone: "Well, then, you'll recall..."

Not having read Blanchot, I realize, is a bit like not having read Beckett, or Calvino, or Auster; Auster has translated Blanchot, for goodness's sake, and I adore Auster, so shouldn't I have followed up before now?  But you know how it goes.

So, finally, I have read one of Blanchot's fictions, and it turns out he is every bit as compelling as one had been led to believe.

The title of L'Arrêt de Mort is most conveniently translated as "death sentence," but might be construed to mean "the halting of death." Its first part is devoted to a female friend of the narrator, referred to only as J., who after a lengthy illness apparently dies, then is resuscitated, then asks the narrator to euthanize her; the second part presents several interactions between the narrator and other women in the wake of J.'s death.

The text is less a roman than it is a récit, its commentators emphasize: that is, not so much a narrative recreating events as a narrative that is itself an event for its narrator, coming to terms with what he is writing about through the process of writing about it. (Like Gatsby, perhaps, though the usual example  is Constant's Adolphe.)

What difference does death make? Can we understand it? Blanchot is engaging Heidegger here, one learns from commentary, folding in as well both the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and the story of Jesus and the daughter of Jairus (the scene where J. revives is as astonishing as the climax of Dreyer's Ordet). Then too--according to Leslie Hill--there may be a political allegory involved, as the narrative includes a couple of precise dates, part one coinciding with the Munich crisis and part two with the German invasion and the collapse of the Third Republic.

My main impression of the text, though, is its continual balancing of contradictions, not so blatant as Beckett's famous one about it raining and not raining, but with the same unsettling, here-and-not-here effect, as assertions conjured themselves up and made themselves disappear in the same sentence. A random instance: "Aux qualités que j'ai dites, Simone D. ajoutait celle-ci, d'être franche mais reservée" ["To the qualities that I have mentioned, Simone D. added this one--to be frank but reserved"]. Got that? She's frank--just in a reserved way. So she's reserved. But frank. What?

Blanchot sets these little tail-eating snakes spinning throughout the text. None of them call more attention to themselves than the one just quoted; instead, they lie in the mind like little time-bombs, some seconds later going off and undermining whatever you had found yourself assuming about a character or situation. The narrator impulsively proposes to Natalie in the subway, obligingly doing so in her own native tongue: "Depuis quelque temps, je lui parlais dans sa langue maternelle, que je trouvais d'autant plus émouvante que j'en connaissais moins les mots" ["For some time, I had been speaking to her in her native language, which I found all the more moving in that I had less understanding of its words"]. But of course--how better express the inexpressible than in a language one does not actually know?

I was a long time coming to Blanchot, but I'm ready to take the plunge.  I've ordered three more.

Doty and Lehman, eds., _The Best American Poetry 2012_

YES, I KNOW, I'm a year behindhand with this--the arrival of the new BAP tends to be my annual reminder that I have yet to read the previous year's BAP. But it's always a pleasure catching up.

I'm working on a hypothesis that male-edited BAPs tend to be less aesthetically varied than female-edited BAPs, to include more poetry that is reminiscent of the editor's own work. Holds true in this instance, I'd say: lots of unrhymed couplets, lists of carefully observed details, orthodox but sometime elaborate syntax, flowers, music…the 2012 BAP leans to the Dotean.

But Doty is at least upfront about this.  "Anthology-making is, at least on one level, a form of self-portraiture," he notes in the volume's introduction (by the way, a better than usual effort in this odd genre). "This book might well be called Seventy-Five Poems Mark Likes, but who'd buy that?"

I might buy that, actually. For me, the highlights of the anthology were two long (13 and 12 pages) elegies in a narrative mode that evoked the Doty of My Alexandria and Atlantis, and thanks to the alphabet they were adjacent to each other: Spencer Reece's "The Road to Emmaus" and Paisley Rekdal's "Wax." Both poems play a long game, aren't nervous about being witty or erudite, and carry the wallop of the actually lived. I plan to look for more of the work of both poets.

I see Denise Duhamel is the editor this year's.  How cool is that?

Kristi Maxwell, _Re-_

"A BOOK-LENGTH POEM about a couple" describes Re- accurately while giving an entirely misleading impression.

For one thing, there is no proper noun to be encountered, so the relationship rides out its vicissitudes in no particular place at no particular time. The text unfolds at a certain level of precise, surreal abstraction: "Hiccups and the sea share / a vulnerability should redundancy denounce them."

For another, much of the diction of the text seems generated by its own phonemes, improvising upon themselves As in--

     that they cancelled noon concealed it within a cloudy beaker

or

     that the lords should overlap and lapse into a quarrel

or

     cells might be salvaged. Lard from the carcass turned salve

--where an aural similarity becomes a quick leap into the oblique.

And then one notices the structural features, that the text's four (like the seasons?) sections each have twelve (like the months of the year?) poems, and that the later poems contain spoonfuls of earlier ones, like sourdough starter. The last line of the first section's third poem is:

     to see the progress of the leisure?

The first line of the second section's third poem is

     The progress of their leisure was such

and its final line is one of those quoted above, "that the lords should overlap and lapse into a quarrel." That, in turn, bends itself into the first line of the third poem of the third section:

     Lords lap the quarantine

--and so on, as lines recur but not exactly, the familiar oddly new and the new oddly familiar, very much as in the unfolding actuality of coupledom.

Maxwell is a poet (like, I'd say, Jon Woodward) who can work within very particular and idiosyncratic constraints yet somehow convey the texture and mystery of the lived and the felt.  Many people, I have the impression, carelessly assume that highly formal poetry and and highly expressive poetry are opposite ends of some spectrum. But are they?  Not always, I think.

Third great new find of 2013

IT'S SHAPING UP as a good year for me, having already come across the work of Karen Hays and Lucy Ives, and now that I am finally getting to the May/June issue of American Reader, I have my third amazng new find of 2013: Carmen Maria Machado.

Her "Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law and Order SVU" looks like an episode guide to the long-running cop series (which I haven't seen) and indeed uses the actual names of twelve seasons' worth of episodes, but the capsule plot descriptions turn into a novella following the outer and inner turmoil, both professonal and private, of Benson and Stabler (and their prankster döppelgangers, Henson and Abler) as they navigate a treacherous urban landscape of abused girls with bells for eyes and insistent subterranean heartbeats.

Sounds goofy, I know, and I don't think I could sell it to my book club, but a deeply felt humanity lurks in the goofiness and the MFA legerdemain. No book yet, so far as I can learn, but I'll be on the lookout.

Does Philip Roth have a magnum opus?

MUCH ENJOYED THE double-barreled page one reviews of the new biographies of Roth and Mailer  in the NYTBR a month ago, especially the review of the Roth bio by Martin Amis, provocative enough to provoke the man himself to write in frosty correction.

The observation that lingered in the mind, though, was from the Graydon Carter review of the Mailer bio. "Unlike his contemporaries Salinger, Capote, Styron, Roth, Vonnegut, Kerouac, Heller, and others," Carter writes, "he [Mailer] produced no single volume that captured and continues to capture the hearts and minds of successive generations." Certainly true, methinks.

But, methought further, does Roth really have such a volume? Carter mentions Portnoy's Complaint, which, yes, every bookish person my age read. But unlike the other novels Carter mentions--Catcher in the Rye, On the Road, Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast at Tiffany's, all of which I happen to know high school and college age people continue to read--I don't know of many people much younger than I who pick up Portnoy. It's not often assigned. It may not even be on on Spark Notes, that near infallible guide to What's Canonical Now.

It happened to be about a month ago, too, that I was finishing up a lifelong-learners community course sort of thing on The Great Gatsby. The members of the class wanted to talk about Great American Novels--a bankrupt category, to be sure, in academic literary criticism, but enjoyable enough to kick around in a desert-island-discs sort of way. We mentioned Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Gatsby itself of course.  Are there more modern candidates? they asked. Well, maybe Beloved, I said. Housekeeping.  The Things They Carried.

I've been thinking: Roth is, to my mind, the great American novelist of his generation, the greatest born between the two world wars. Yet is there a particular volume among his many excellent novels of which one would say, "oh, you have to read that one--everybody has to read that one." I can't think of one. And I've read them all.  Loved them all. I ran the same question by a literary friend.  American Pastoral, perhaps? Maybe, but even that one seems deeply idiosyncratic in a way.  The Counterlife? That's my personal favorite, but you would have to read the trilogy first. Portnoy's Complaint? I think the feminism that burst upon us about the very same moment as Alexander Portnoy made his novel more or less obsolete as anything but a 1960s period piece.

This worries me. Roth is the great novelist of his generation, but does he have an As I Lay Dying, a Huckleberry Finn?  Jesus, does he even have a Slaughterhouse-Five?

Lawrence Wright, _Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief_

LAWRENCE WRIGHT IS not only an excellent journalist but a brave man, if what he says about the Church of Scientology's pattern of subjecting its critics to intimidation, vilification, and worse is true...and I'm not saying it is, mind you, as the last thing I need right now is to be intimidated, vilified, or worse by the Church of Scientology. But he seems to have done his work.

I think I picked this up partly because I was fascinated by Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master and partly out of a lingering interest in home-grown American religions, initiated by reading Harold Bloom's The American Religion many years ago and recently boosted by Laurie Maffly-Kipp's Penguin anthology, American Scriptures.

At the end of the day, though, L. Ron Hubbard just does not seem to have the true mad village visionary gleam of Joseph Smith, say, or Mary Baker Eddy, or Ellen White. Scientology looks to have been 100% American High Hokum from the outset: a little self-help, a little gadgetry, a little science fiction, a little of the "unleash your hidden powers" appeal from those tiny little ads in the back of the pulpier of those old "men's magazines," like True or Argosy.

Clever of him, though, to set up shop in southern California, where the talented and good-looking arrive in flocks, badly in need of some confirmation that they are special and unique, daily subject to doubts and fears and various humiliations, and willing to pay whatever it costs to get to that psychological place where they can unleash their hidden powers.

I could be wrong, of course.  Perhaps some day Hubbard will be up there with Smith, Eddy, and White--in some ways, he's exactly the messiah we deserve.

Lucy Ives, _Orange Roses_

ANOTHER GREAT FIND in Conjunctions 60 was "Orange Roses" by Lucy Ives, perhaps a poem, perhaps a next-American-essay essay in the d'Agatan mode, but remarkable however one chooses to designate it.

"Orange Roses" is the title piece of Ives's recently-published collection, which seems in part to be a contemplation of her own career, judging from the titles "Early Poem" and "Early Novel," and the final piece, "On Imitation," about a quest of sorts she undertook at age twenty. One of the poems was published in Ploughshares when Ives was only 21 or 22; it was called "The Country House" then, but here it is titled "Ploughshares," which is both a canny gesture and a great joke.

I hope to discuss Orange Roses in a more respectable corner of the blogosphere, so I will say no more about it here, save to note that while the author, born in 1980, may be on the young side to be casting her eye over her journey as a writer, the Grateful Dead had only been a band for five or six years when they sang about what a "long, strange trip" theirs had been, and who are we to deny that their trip had indeed been long and strange? Ives's own trip, on the evidence of this book, has been strange and long enough.